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Saturday, February 11, 2006

Cultural? I think Not.

Colbert King of the Washington Post has an editorial in today's paper, "A Fitting Funeral for Mrs. King", and in it attacks the right's reaction to the comments concerning President Bush made at the funeral.As a repressed Catholic earlier in life, I will admit a cultural gap between myself and black Baptists. The few times I've attended those services I have been quite uncomfortable, not because of the message, but the method of delivery. It's definitely light years away from anything I experienced at St. Mary's.But using Colbert's logic, President Bush should have said a few things that weren't said. Things like, "Imagine how much easier Mr. and Mrs. King's life would have been had the Democrats not filibuster Civil Rights legislation in the 50's and 60's." Or, "How much better off would we be today if the Kennedy and Johnson administrations not tried to smear her family, in their fight for civil rights".They are both true statements, and it's possible that if America had seen a unified not divided congress, a lot of civil rights problems could have been avoided during the era of her husband. That is the concept of "leadership by example". They would have also set off a firestorm in the press, about the president turning her funeral into a political circus.Bush didn't say those things, not because they aren't true, or because of press reaction. He didn't say them because of something called respect. Maybe it's a "white thing" but we generally don't use funerals to attack others; especially others who we've invited to be there.Former president Jimmy Carter, aware of the current debate over domestic spying, said, "It was difficult for [the Kings] personally with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated, and they became the targets of secret government wiretapping and other surveillance."Yet Mr. Carter didn’t acknowledge (nor does Mr. King) that it was Democratic administrations and governors doing the tapping of the King’s phone lines. Instead, he did use it for a moment of politics, mostly politics of deception. Evidently GWB in the 1960’s was not in college, but wire tapping the Kings.After the NAACP fiasco of 2000, should anyone be surprised at how the African- American community treats Bush? Never mind that more blacks now own homes, and have moved into the middle class than during any other presidency. More blacks graduate high school able to read and write because of NCLB, but it’s bashed by their community. Not because it isn’t working, but because much of the funding for black advocacy organizations comes from groups that hate the program.Back on the topic, Mr. King also misses a big point of the blogosphere's annoyance; and that is that famous liberal funerals have become a pulpit to attack Bush. Nearly all who blogged and editorialized on the subject drew a lot of comparisons to the Paul Wellstone funeral, which was also a bash Bush fest. And it can't be said that it was because of a "black white cultural difference".

Respect, as far as I know, isn’t a cultural thing. As was pointed out in my blog a few months back you normally don’t invite someone into your house to whack them in the knees. According to Colbert King, you do if the house is holding a funeral for a black person and you invite a WASP to attend.Truth is, many of the folks who got up on stage and decided to use it as a pulpit to bash the President also preach to us about cultural tolerance, and how forcing our culture on others is rude, and should be avoided. But shouldn’t they have then realized, if this truly was a “cultural thing”, that was exactly what they did to the President? No, Mr. King, it wasn’t a “cultural issue” at the funeral, it was a political issue. The people who attacked the President chose that time to do it for one reason; they knew they’d get air time on TV. George Bush, to his credit, attended, knowing exactly what would happen. He couldn’t decline attending that particular funeral without being raked across the coals for it. So he went, and unlike the speakers who used it as a political sideshow, was humble dignified, and remembered the life of the woman the day was about.

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"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who can never be free except made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." --John Stuart Mill